Maybe it was a bomb...Guest wrote: ↑Sat Jun 26, 2021 10:13 pmSo it would be ok for 40 years, and then collapse? That building pancaked completely, after waiting 40 years.

Maybe it was a bomb...Guest wrote: ↑Sat Jun 26, 2021 10:13 pmSo it would be ok for 40 years, and then collapse? That building pancaked completely, after waiting 40 years.
There might have been a purge of some lower ranking generals during Bush II over opinions that going into Iraq was a bad idea. Outside of that, the general officers removed from the services have been guilty of corruption or sexual misconduct. It has been bad enough for each service to have to set up a special unit just to investigate general officer misconduct. So no, neither Obama nor Trump nor Biden have been "purging" the military.This offends me greatly to see military doing this. I waited until the morning after seeing this last night. And I'd like some perspective. If Navigator could comment I'd much appreciate it.
It is now being reported that the swimming pool foundation was improperly built and that it, along with the poor concrete pouring mentioned by others, undermined the structural integrity of the structure.
I don't know if we could survive losing the opening battles of WW3.Navigator wrote: ↑Sat Jun 26, 2021 11:31 pmThere might have been a purge of some lower ranking generals during Bush II over opinions that going into Iraq was a bad idea. Outside of that, the general officers removed from the services have been guilty of corruption or sexual misconduct. It has been bad enough for each service to have to set up a special unit just to investigate general officer misconduct. So no, neither Obama nor Trump nor Biden have been "purging" the military.This offends me greatly to see military doing this. I waited until the morning after seeing this last night. And I'd like some perspective. If Navigator could comment I'd much appreciate it.
What IS happening, and this is true after every major war, is that generals who were competent leave (due to old age or going into politics) and they are replaced not by other competent individuals, but by military incompetents who excel at office politics. This is the norm. The last truly competent war fighters from WW2 left the military by about 1960. A case in point was Matthew Ridgeway. Look up his bio on wikipedia.
Now adays we have people like the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs talking about understanding white rage and playing to his political bosses.
What is even scarier is the lack of strategic and technical understanding by the highest ranks throughout the Pentagon and military establishment. As a case in point, look at Lieutenant General James Mingus. He is a 3 star general (well on track for 4th star and greater responsibility) who is current the head of Operational Planning at the Pentagon (the J3). This is the person who overseas the creation of war plans, and, during war, the execution of those plans.
General Mingus is a graduate of Winona State University, with a BA in Music. So this guy went to a third rate academic institution, and got a BA in a decidedly non-intellectual field. He has no further education outside of the Army War College (where anyone who shows up graduates). He is in charge of what will go on militarily when we respond to China attacking Taiwan (and other places).
He, like most of the general officer corps, got to the top by being a gung-ho ranger/paratrooper. He bounced in and out of the 82d Airborne division and ranger units. Only by great exception does someone without this airborne ranger pedigree get to the top of the Army. Now I am sure they are brave people. And are physically very strong and all that. The problem is that war plans, strategy and so on are extremely intellectual things, not physical in nature. Few, if any of them, are up to the intellectual demands.
So at the start of the coming war, we are going to be led by people in the "below average" intellectual category. It is going to be as bad as the Union efforts in the first couple of years of the US Civil War.
Uh-oh...John wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 8:23 pm** 27-Jun-2021 World View: India moves 50,000 troops to China border
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... ense-shift
India has redirected at least 50,000 additional troops to its border
with China in a historic shift toward an offensive military posture
against the world’s second-biggest economy. ...
Over the past few months, India has moved troops and fighter jet
squadrons to three distinct areas along its border with China,
according to four people familiar with the matter. All in all, India
now has roughly 200,000 troops focused on the border, two of them
said, which is an increase of more than 40% from last year. ...
Whereas previously India’s military presence was aimed at blocking
Chinese moves, the redeployment will allow Indian commanders more
options to attack and seize territory in China if necessary in a
strategy known as “offensive defense,” one of the people said. That
includes a lighter footprint involving more helicopters to airlift
soldiers from valley to valley along with artillery pieces like the
M777 howitzer built by BAE Systems Inc.
- Map showing locations of China-India border tensions
Kim Jong-un: Prisoner in his own castle?
The first inference is that North Korea is not a state run on the whim and fancy of a singular ruler, as is often portrayed in western mass media. The fact that many people take such a misinformed view is, for Schafer, due to the continued success of North Korean propaganda. Instead, Schafer presents Kim Jong-un as merely a symbol, appointed to continue his father's rule, but achieving his position only after having granted a series of concessions to the hardliners in the North Korean military and to the wider political apparatus. Despite North Korean moderates' desires for cultural exchanges and possible economic reform in a Chinese manner, the hardliners' victory in North Korea was made possible through the weakening of the Kim family's position, following Kim Jong-il's stroke in the summer of 2008.
While Pyongyang is initially presented as home to a clash between extreme and moderate approaches, it is the former that have won the day, through their use of belligerent acts that include, but are not limited to, the sinking of the RAS Cheonan, the breaching of the Leap Day Agreement, the public execution of Jang Song-thaek, the closing and eventual destruction of parts of the Kaesong Industrial Zone and various military and border skirmishes. For Schafer, these acts are not carried out solely on the order of Kim Jong-un, but are often outside of his control and perhaps actually to send him the message: that he is imminently replaceable.
Schafer is also quick to discount suggestions that, following the examples of Libya and Iraq, the North's nuclear missiles are but a defensive necessity in a world characterized by brutal and unilateral American imperialism. While they may serve that purpose, the book makes no secret of the fact that Pyongyang's nuclear weapons have offensive intent and that their goals center on removing American troops from the Korean Peninsula (by force if necessary), as well as carrying out the oft-repeated desire for undefined international justice.
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